Lesson Plans: Resting on the Ocean Floor

Images act as vehicles to playfully guide you into the depths of your autonomic nervous system in the second part of Karinne Keithley Syers'sradio instructional Lesson Plans.

Then, in part two, Resting on the Ocean Floor, Karinne guides the listener through a series of images that gesture metaphorically toward the nervous system, or the 'vegetable body', the part that controls rest, digestion and the activity of the internal organs.

Part class, part essay, part audio mood.

Lesson Plans is based on Body, Mind, and Image, a year-long class co-taught with K.J. Holmes through Movement Research, New York City's home for deep, weird dance. That class played with the somatics practice of image work, or ideokinesis, passed down into the current dance community through a lineage of teachers including Mabel Todd, Barbara Clark, Andre Bernard, Lulu Sweigard, and Irene Dowd. Developed by Todd after suffering an accident that left her unable to walk, the work involves meditating on images while letting the body rest, based upon the premise that we guide the vast co-ordinations that underlie any simple motor action through thinking in pictures (open the door, walk across the room), which simplify a process too complex for us to grasp. These pictures map onto the real body processes, sharing pattern and movement.

Karinne Keithley Syers is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and teacher, who has spent the last twenty years drifting between dance, performance, literature, radio, and bookmaking. She teaches writing, performance making, and somatics. Her audio work has filled the rooms of many performances, been podcast at the Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal, and been transmitted by WFMU and the ABC.